June 2010 – The TroposphereMeteorology for the cloud computing world2016-11-15T17:39:04Zhttp://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/cloud-computing/feed/atom/CarlBrookshttp://http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/blog/The-Troposphere/Amazons-early-efforts-at-cloud-computing-Partly-accidental2010-06-21T19:15:39Z2010-06-17T21:22:52ZFormer ‘Master of Disaster’ at Amazon Jesse Robbins has a couple of fun tidbits to share about the birth of Amazon EC2. He said the reason it succeeded as an idea in Amazon’s giant retail machine was partly due to his inter-territorial corporate grumpiness and partly due to homesickness–not exactly the masterstroke of carefully planned...

]]>Former ‘Master of Disaster’ at Amazon Jesse Robbins has a couple of fun tidbits to share about the birth of Amazon EC2. He said the reason it succeeded as an idea in Amazon’s giant retail machine was partly due to his inter-territorial corporate grumpiness and partly due to homesickness–not exactly the masterstroke of carefully planned skunkworks genius it’s been made out to be by some.

Robbins said Chris Pinkham, creator of EC2 along with Chris Brown (and later joined by Wiljem Van Biljon recruited in South Africa)was itching to go back to South Africa right around the time Amazon started noodling around with the idea of selling virtual servers. At the time, Robbins was in charge of all of Amazon’s outward facing web properties and keeping them running.

“Chris really, really wanted to be back in South Africa,” said Robbins, and rather than lose the formidable talent behind Amazon’s then VP of engineering, Amazon brass cleared the project and off they went with a freedom to innovate that many might be jealous of.

“It might never have happened if they weren’t so far away from the mothership”, Amazon’s Seatlle headquarters, said Robbins.

Now half a world away, Christopher Brown, who joined Pinkham as a founding member, architect, and lead developer for EC2, set about finding resources to test his ideas on automation in a fully virtualized server environment. Robbins, who knew about the project, gave Brown the interdepartmental cold shoulder.

“I was horrified at the thought of the dirty, public Internet touching MY beautiful operations,” he said with all the relish of a born operator. Robbins had his hands on the reins of the worlds most successful online retail operation from soup to nuts and wasn’t about to let it be mucked up with long-distance experimentation.

To this day he gets a kick out of the apparently unquenchable (and totally untrue) rumour that EC2 came about because Amazon had spare capacity in its data centers, because his attitude at the time was, like every IT operations manager in a big organization, was that there is no such thing as spare capacity. It’s ALL good for something and NOBODY gets any of it if you can humanly prevent it. It’s‘mine, mine, mine’ as the duck said.

Brown, therefore, grumbled up his own data center (not that that was a stretch for him; Pinkham ran South Africa’s first ISP), set to work, and out popped the world’s first commercially successful cloud, running independently of Amazon’s regular IT. The rest is history (the cartoon in the link is “Ali Baba Bunny“(1957)).

UPDATE: A factual error and the omission of Christopher Brown as Chris Pinkham’s original counterpart in the move from the US to South Africa has been corrected. I regret the error and unintended omission.

]]>3CarlBrookshttp://http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/blog/The-Troposphere/VMware-wants-the-whole-private-cloud-software-stack-and-it-may-get-it2010-06-04T19:34:36Z2010-06-04T00:57:24ZDetails of VMware’s Project Redwood have been unearthed, and it’s a telling look at where VMware sees itself in the new era of cloud computing: in charge of everything. While Redwood is still vapor as far as the public is concerned (and the basic VMware cloud technology, vCloud is still in pre-release at ver. 09)...

While Redwood is still vapor as far as the public is concerned (and the basic VMware cloud technology, vCloud is still in pre-release at ver. 09) – it’s clear that VMware thinks it can capitalize on its position as the default virtualization platform for the enterprise and swoop in to become the private cloud platform of choice as enterprises increasing retool their data centers to look, and work, more like services like Rackspace and Amazon Web Services.

Some people are grumpy about the term private cloud, saying it’s just a data center modernized and automated to the hilt – let’s get that out of the way by noting that “private cloud” is a lot easier to say than “highly automated and fully managed self-provisioning server infrastructure data center system with integrated billing”. It’s also less annoying than “Infrastructure 3.0”, a term that can make normally calm operators scream like enraged pterodactyls. Private cloud it is.

Project Redwood, now known as the VMware Service Director, will lay over a VMware vSphere installation and allow users governed self-service usage via a web portal and an API, effectively obscuring both the data center hardware and the virtualization software VMware customers are used to operating. The goal is to automate resource management so that admins don’t have to and make distributing computing resources as easy and flexible as possible, while maintaining full control.

According to the presentation, vCloud Service Director will support three modes of resource management: “Allocation pools“, where users are given a ‘container’ of resources and allowed to create and use VMs anyway they like up to the limits of the CPU and storage they paid for; “Reservation pools“, which give users a set of resources they can increase or decrease by themselves and “Pay-per-VM” for single-instance purchasing.

–From the article

That’s the IT side taken care of- the other really significant concept is vApps- users can build, save and move application stacks en suite, and will be able to flow out of their private cloud into VMware-approved public cloud services– vCloud Express hosters like BlueLock and Terremark. So admins get control and visibility, and users get true scalability and self-service. That means there’s something for everyone in the enterprise.

Other tidbits from the document-VMware’s concept of cloud:

Cloud Computing according to VMware
Lightweight entry/exit service acquisition model
Consumption based pricing
Accessible using standard internet protocols
Elastic
Improved economics due to shared infrastructure
Massively more efficient to manage

Of course, there are products that can already do this and already well on the way to maturity- Abiquo springs to mind. You can do everything Redwood is shooting for today, if you’re so inclined. A titillating report says an audience that reportedly contained VMware engineers cheered during an Abiquo demo. The problem is you have to bring your own hypervisor- few want their YAVS(Yet Another Vendor Syndrome)infection complicated.

Oracle, on the other hand, has reinvented itself as a “complete stack” of private cloud products, from the Sun iron on up, and IBM is happy to sell you iron that behaves like cloud, and so on.

But VMware is betting brand loyalty, severe antipathy towards non-commodity hardware and inertia will catapult it past the upstarts and comfortably ahead of Microsoft, its real competition here, which is shooting for the same goal with Hyper-V and the Dynamic Data Center but is at least a year behind VMware here.

Enterprises running clouds are inevitable, goes the thinking; virtualization is ideally suited to both cloud computing and the commoditized hardware market–provide the entire software stack needed to turn those servers and switches into compute clouds, and you’ll make out like a bandit, especially when the only serious competition to try and offer the same thing right now is Canonical on one extreme, and Oracle on the other.

If you are running an enterprise data center, want drop-in, one-stop cloud computing, and your options are “free–from hippies” or “bend over“, VMware, who already makes your preferred hypervisor, will be a favored alternative. All they have to do is execute.